


Killing Me Softly

by Niccolò Machiavelli (Piccolo_Machiavelli)



Series: Before the Storm, After the Fire [9]
Category: 15th Century CE RPF, 16th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, Machiavelli - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 23:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9209135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piccolo_Machiavelli/pseuds/Niccol%C3%B2%20Machiavelli
Summary: Machiavelli finally returns home to his waiting family, but all is not well.





	

There's something so unbelievably comforting about the darkness. 

I never thought about it until just now, really. As a child, I used to be scared of the darkness. Looking up at the night sky was terrifying. It was so vast, so all-encompassing, so black, and I was haunted by nightmares that it would open wide its jaws and swallow me whole. Not even the stars could take away from the terror I felt whenever I dared to look up at night. It means something else to me now. Safety. The idea of being secure and hidden away from everything else that wants to swallow me whole. A type of blissful oblivion where I can hide away from it all. A place where I feel no pain or suffering. 

In here, it's the darkness of unconsciousness, a deep sleep that allows me to escape this hell. But the darkness is not for living, tangible mortals, and all must come out to face the light, even if it at first appears to be far too bright to withstand. The pain will wither away and fade eventually, like all things. 

I am tossed back into the sun, shoved into the light by the little stream of light in my cell. It is the first thing I see when I open my eyes, that one beam of light dancing across the room and contorting itself on the bars that keep me in here. It bounces off of my face, tickling my nose as it heads down the path it has left across the room. I awaken to a dull aching in my newly-relocated shoulders. I have borne six drops: three on the first day, and three not too long after that. 

And I can hardly believe it. I've spent a month languishing inside this light, inside this darkness, yearning to be brought back into one or the other. Marietta and our children must be wondering if I'm ever coming home, or if I'm even alive. I am not the foolish, paranoid, thirty-two-year-old man I was when I married her; I do not doubt her fidelity like I used to. It just took me a while to realise that it was all an unhealthy and hypocritical dose of projection. She has stayed inside the house, she has stayed put, she has stayed faithful. I have transcended all three in flesh and in mind. 

“Niccolò,” a voice calls. The usual morning guard, no doubt, but something is different in his voice. He sounds unnaturally cheerful. “Niccolò, have you yet received the news?”

“I only receive small tributes from you. Meagre food, some ink and parchment, and that's about it. No respect or visitors from anywhere special. News is awfully hard to come by, you see,” I answer him. This month has taken its toll on me. It's turned me into a bitter, sarcastic shell of a man. I sit up in bed, shielding my eyes from the light. “And before breakfast too? Damn, what could possibly be that important?”

“I can see you still haven't cut your shit out,” he remarks, stepping into the light’s path. He carries in his hand a rolled-up piece of parchment with the papal seal on it. “You've been pardoned! You're lucky that you didn't end up losing your head like Boscoli and Capponi did, Niccolò.”

I've been what? “Scusami, did you say pardoned? By whom?” My heart flutters already, and I cannot hide my smile. This isn't a joke, I know it isn't. There's even something unreadable but different in the way the guard speaks. 

“After Giuliano’s death, our new… contender decided to be merciful and pardon all those who were imprisoned,” the guard tells me. 

I rub my eyes and decide to stretch my sore arms. Avoiding the guard’s gaze, I lazily extend them, trying not to wince. “Our Prince? Dead? No one told me that.” 

He laughs. Laughs! The keeper of my fate, the one who could have allowed me to starve, my imprisoner! “Oh, no, not that Giuliano. Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere. The Pope’s life came to an end on this February the twenty-first, in the year of our Lord 1513. We're terribly sorry you didn't get the information.”

I pull myself off of the bed and meet him at the bars. “Who's the one who pardoned me? The one who's allowing me to go back to my family by some divine intervention?” I ask, looking back for a moment to consider what I have to pack. I turn away when I realise that I'm looking back towards an empty cell and that there's nothing I can take with me. 

“He calls himself Pope Leo X. He's a Medici, but it should be obvious to anyone who's been living in this city for the past year that it would be fitting to have a blessed Pope as well as a Prince, you know?” the guard says. “And somehow, even though you were convicted as part of the Boscoli Conspiracy, you managed to keep your head and get a pardon. By a Medici, no less.” 

He must not feel threatened, because he doesn't back away from me. For the first time in a month, I am looking into the eyes of my captor, only to find that he's no older than Marietta at most. His face still retains a youth and an innocence lost to so many visits to the cellar and the dungeons. 

The guard looks happy. “Dio mio, grazie,” I thank him, and he's genuinely smiling. “You could have just executed me like you did with the wailers in the next cell over. Why didn't you?” 

His hand fumbles for the lock on the cell, and he fishes a key out of his pocket. “I guess I just wanted to give you a chance,” he confesses. “I heard you were a family man. You were yelling something about your wife and children when they first dragged you in here. The other ones? Nay, they couldn't be arsed to find a wife, let alone have a child or two. I wasted time and convicted the others first so that you'd hopefully be left alive. And you are.”

He swings open the cell door and steps back, extending his arm to usher me outside into the narrow hallway. “There's a cart waiting to deliver you back to your farm outside Florence. I'd give you a horse to bring back there, but I don't think you're in the right condition to travel alone. Your arms still weak?” 

The truth is that they are. I doubt they're healing correctly, and every movement I make with them is either excruciatingly painful, or jerky, or both. The aftermath is the biggest torture. Feeling the muscles in my arms shredding is nothing compared to what I now face. I once managed to dump water all over myself, and I called out into the darkness for a guard so that he might give me something dry to wear. Judging by the look on that guard’s face, I know he didn’t think that was water.

“A bit.” The old aching in my heart has left only to be replaced with a new one. The old aching for my city has left me while I have been trapped inside a prison for the past month, kicking rats and training myself to learn to write again. Writing is like walking, at least to me. It's always been something innate for me to do, and I haven't forgotten. I've only slipped into a regression of jerky motions and torn parchment. 

But it's the new ache that sneaks its way into my heart like a thief in the night, the ache that will manifest itself in broken bones, torn muscles, and fast-falling tears. The ache that will bring with it waves of despair and a thirst unquenched. The ache on Marietta’s face when she finally sees me again. 

It does not do me well to linger where the shadows play. 

“I never asked you for your name,” I say to the guard as I leave my barren cell, slamming the door behind me with an eagerness that resounds around the entire dungeon. “We've known each other for a month, but it seems that we are still strangers.”  
He lets me walk in front of him towards the doorway out, but even I am not oblivious to the sword poking my back. “Lodovico,” he finally answers. “My name is Lodovico.” 

We pass by rows of bedraggled prisoners inside their cells. The prison is much less populated than it was when I first arrived and I was led down this same stretch just a month ago. I’ve memorised the pattern by now: there was the old screamer one cell over, the one who was given many more drops on the strappado than he should have received. By the first door into the block, there was an old woman who refused to eat anything but freshly-cooked rats and would spend her days playing with the creatures that often roamed the cell grounds. Then there were those two, those two that the guards always spoke about in hushed tones even though they were a main topic of conversation. Pietro Boscoli and Agostino Capponi. They weren't in this particular group of people, no. They were notorious enough to have a cell of their own. 

Now, the prison is desolate. The only one left in this block besides me is a man with letters branded onto his forehead. His bony hands hang through the bars of the cell, and upon seeing me being led outside, he immediately becomes agitated, rattling on the bars and cursing me. 

Lodovico stops before we reach the last door that leads to the way out. “I'd like to give you my thanks. With your release, I'm getting the hell out of here,” he tells me. He appears in front of me, finally sheathing his sword. There is a thin scar on his cheek, which is likely why he carries one. 

“What are you thanking me for? You're the one who's pardoning me. I'm the one who's grateful that you haven't killed me yet,” I reply, anxiously rocking on my feet and leaning towards the door. “And you're leaving here? How?”

He flashes me a big, toothy grin. “It's not just me. Alessandro and I have been waiting for a pardon or a letter of release for God knows how long. Without it, we would be stuck in this hellhole. No one tells you when you sign up for this that it isn't worth the pay. It's taking a toll on us. We're getting out. We're getting out of here.”

“Alesso?” I would imagine that someone like Lodovico who still has his whole life ahead of him would leave, but why Alesso?

“He broke you, but you broke him. After what happened, he couldn't take it anymore. The weight of what he'd done was too much for him to handle. He was the one who tortured you that night - but something tells me you already knew that, didn't you?” he says, turning the knob on the metal door. 

“Of course. For a long time.”

Impatiently, I wrench the door open to ease the slow burn of waiting. What greets me is the sight of my old, familiar city in all her glory. Most of the snow that had left the city in a frost-covered daze has vanished, leaving behind it small patches of ice on the ground. The grass that had rescinded during the winter is turning green anew. A single lily blooms at my feet, swaying gently in the bitter wind. Everything is as golden and as beautiful as I remember it. 

But even I know I cannot stay. Even as I bid farewell to Lodovico (as an “old friend”), the Florentines are as quick to get me out of the city as they were to briefly welcome me back into it. A cart pulls over in the street, narrowly missing me. It halts with a loud shriek of its rickety wheels, stopping just a few feet short of me. 

“Ehi, you. Get in. No time for wandering. Just because you've received special treatment from the Pope doesn't mean you're exempt from your sentence. There's plenty of people in this city who still want your head,” the driver calls down to me. He's a chubby little man with a piglike nose and beady eyes. His fingers grip the reins on his horse tightly, and his white knuckles make his fingers look like salsicce. The driver smiles at me, revealing a mouth full of yellowed, lopsided, chipped teeth. 

“Do you even know where you're taking me?” If I linger for a moment longer, he'll sic the guards on me. I wait for him to extend his hand so I can be lifted into the cart, but he never takes his salsicce away from the reins. Rolling my eyes, I lift the edge of my robes and haul myself into the cart.

He peers behind him to see who has entered his cart, and I can see that one of his eyes is cloudy and twitches erratically. “I knew your father once. I remember where he lived. The same place where you now live. You, however, are not like your father. He was a noble man. You are a common criminal.”

A common criminal. I didn’t expect to be treated like a hero after everything that’s happened, but I never thought I would become one of Florence’s most infamously hated men. What do the ones I was forced to leave behind think about me? Does Agostino still view me as that heroic, dashing diplomat that I was ten years ago, kicking up dust and snow as I crossed the fields of Tuscany? Does Biagio still view me as the jester of the Chancery, remembering all of those times when I rolled up pieces of parchment and tossed them at our boss’s head? I would beg the driver for a chance to see them, but it isn’t safe. 

“But they will remember me. Can you say the same for yourself?” It comes out more bitterly than I want it to, and after that, he and I say no more words. I barely notice as the cart starts rolling down the street, at first like gentle strolling, but soon everything becomes a blur. Flowers blend into flowers; buildings become one another. The churches and walkways that greeted me all my life are swept away upon a wave in this sea of gold. My eyes have become unused to the splendour of it all, and I can feel myself drifting off. 

It’s a lot warmer here than I remembered inside these walls. The sun caresses every crevice of Florence, leaving a dry heat in its wake despite it being winter. I want to see her for one last time, my city of gold, but she too has turned her back on me. She closes my eyes and pushes me out of her welcoming arms, leaving me as empty as I was before I ever made my short return. 

I am startled awake by the jolt of the cart colliding with a rock, the one noticeable large stone that I have yet to move out of the path at the villa. Disoriented, I sit up and clear my eyes from grit, and the villa that I have become well-acquainted with appears before my eyes. Nothing has changed in the short while that I've been gone: the grass that I last saw deadened and dried has regained a little bit of life, and green spikes stick through the snow that has been on the ground longer than I’ve been gone. The sky is still a bleary white, brimming with another load of snow to rain upon the ground and to cover the tips of the trees. 

“Out.” The cart rocks again as the driver hoists himself up the steps. “Come on. I have important deliveries to make. I don’t have all day. Out.”

He lunges towards me to grab ahold of my arm, and I pull back to avoid his iron grasp. I push past him, placing him into one of the seats. He grumbles and tries to place his boot over the trail of my robes, but I am too quick for him. I climb down the steps and land on the ground with a thud, and I don’t look back to see where he is as I approach the front door. I wait to feel his hot breath on my neck. There is nothing.

I glance over my shoulder for a short moment. The driver is eyeing me closely, never once taking his eyes off of me as he exits the back of the cart and climbs back into the driver’s seat. Once I decide I’m done looking back, I reach up with an unsteady arm and knock on the door.

“Marietta?” It gives underneath my touch, and I realise it was never shut to begin with. A bucket with a few stones sits between the wall and the edge of the door, effectively propping it open. A fair amount of ice has left a frozen shield on top of the rocks. The reflection off of the winter sun hits the ice and burns patterns into my eyes. 

By the window sits my eldest daughter, Primerana. The sun illuminates her tear-streaked face and her dark hair that is normally put up in a bun like her mother’s is. Her hair is dishevelled, hanging heavy over her shoulders like a storm hangs over the sea; dark, brooding. She does not hear me or notice the door opening. Her eyes are fixated on something far away from here and unattainable. Maybe me, I realise.

“Niccolò!” Alas, I am not prepared for the shriek that follows. Something collides with the floor in the kitchen, and my wife whips around the corner and pulls the door open, looking back to see what made the noise. Her light-blue dress is soaked with water, and I figure she must have dropped a bucket when she heard me call her name. “Oh, Dio mio, Niccolò! You’re home!” She pulls me into the house with arms wrapped around me like a vise. 

“Papa?” Primerana’s voice croaks, and her voice is followed by the exclamations of several more high-pitched ones. Thump, thump, thump go the steps above us, the steps of children’s feet on the floor, the steps of children racing one another down the stairs to greet someone who has been gone for what seems like a long, long time.

Primerana squeezes her arm between Marietta’s body and mine and embraces me from the other side, laying her teary face on my chest. “God, I missed you. I missed you so much. I thought you would never come back for me,” she says. At my feet is another small child, a mess of curly hair and tears. I can hardly maintain my composure. 

“How could you say such a thing?” I fear she cannot sense the jesting tone in my voice. Her face is grim and losing colour. “Ah, you know I don’t mean it like that. In spirit or in this form, you know I’ll always be here for you, no matter what.” 

“Damn it,” Primerana curses under her breath but just loud enough for me to hear. “Won’t you embrace me back? You’re so cold. I know you rode home in this terrible weather, but why are you so cold?” She squeezes me harder, determined to bring life to this old man’s bones and return the warmth to them that left with the summer. “Please, father. I haven’t seen you in so long.”

I shake my head at her. “Has your dear mother taught you those harsh words?” I ask, and I lift my arms to embrace her as I usually would after a long journey home.  
Quickly, I notice that something is very wrong.  
My arms are immobile. Cold, just like she says. They are entirely numb to any feeling. It takes me looking down to see that Marietta’s hand is clasped firmly around mine, rubbing it, trying to bring colour back into it, but she is unsuccessful. She lets out a small cry and touches the rest of my arm to see if it feels the same way. My skin is like a stiff block of wood. Oh, they hold me so close, and I cannot hold them back! 

“Niccolò?” Marietta’s voice is insistent. Tears gather in her eyes. Tears gather in Primerana’s and Baccina’s and little Bernardo’s eyes. They don’t understand. “Please, husband. It’s all right. It’s only me.” 

“It’s not that,” I choke out. “It’s… it’s that I can’t.” Tears gather in my eyes, too. I do not understand.

“You can’t? You can’t what?” Marietta shakes my arms as if to get them to function again. “You can’t… hold me?” She gasps and backs away. I must be a monster to her now, a monster that has showed up unannounced after a month in prison with a changed mind and a changed body. “What did they do? What did they do to you in there?” 

I am almost oblivious to the shrill wailing of my three children. Marietta’s reaction hurts me the most. “I have no strength in me. I have no strength left.” The ground shifts underneath my feet, and I stagger, realising that my vision is fading. “Marietta? Who dimmed the lights? It’s getting dark in here, amore.”

The ground violently shifts once again, and I can feel myself swaying like a flag in the wind. Dimmer and dimmer grows everything around me until all is silent and still. I am collapsing, being torn away from the sun, torn away from the light, and thrust once more into the black of night. I greet it as if it was an old friend to take me away from the pain.

There's something so unbelievably comforting about the darkness.


End file.
